The present invention relates to educational apparatus. More particularly this invention provides a student-programmable electronic instrumentation device and system for use in teaching students at the high school or junior college level how to provide instrumental circuits enabling them to measure physical and biological phenomena and also for teaching problem solving in the biological and scientific fields. It aids in teaching instrumentation, measurement of phenomena, and understanding of the phenomena.
Scientific instumentation employing electronic principles has long been known and has been widely used in the fields of research and higher-level education. The instruments have typically been very sophisticated, delicate, and expensive and have often necessitated a rather thorough understanding of their operative principles by users before they could be utilized effectively. Also, such instruments were highly specialized; generally, limited to work with one type of phenomena and completely unsuited to making measurements of unrelated or distantly related phenomena. Further, those prior art instruments were designed primarily for use by scientists, engineers, and technicians in industrial and scientific research, development, testing, and maintenance and in the health care fields of research and clinical diagnosis. They were not designed for use by high school and junior college students.
Heretofore, no single instrumentation device has been provided primarily for high school and junior college students and teachers as an instruction aid usable over a broad spectrum of curricula ranging from the life sciences of biology, zoology, botany, physiology, botany, and biomedical technology through the physical sciences of chemistry, physics and electronics. Further, the complexity, delicacy, high cost, and inflexibility of existing instruments discouraged many high school teachers and school districts from using them as instructional aids, much less making them widely available for use and handling by students. Thus, such instruments were rarely, if ever, available to students as learning tools to enhance interest and understanding of scientific and technological principles and techniques.
Furthermore, there has heretofore been no multipurpose device enabling the teaching and appreciation of instrumentation for measuring various phenomena of widely differing types and to do so at the high school and junior college level, while also inculcating an appreciation of accuracy and how it is obtained.